Winter visitors

The swallow and cuckoo are familiar birds that come to us in the spring, letting us know that warmer days are on the way. Less familiar are birds that come to us from Northern climes to take advantage of our milder winters. There are three main groups of these less well-known winter visitors.

You will see swans on your local pond or lake in the summer months, paired up for breeding. These are mute swans that are with us all year round, easily distinguished by their bright orange and black bill. From October onwards more swans appear and are seen grazing on open fields on farmland. These are whooper swans that have come to us from their breeding sites in Iceland. One of the best places to see them are on fields next to the Toome bypass. Whooper swans have yellow and black bills and straighter necks than the mute swan. An easier clue is the size of the flock - if you see a large flock of swans in the winter they are more likely to be whooper swans.

We are also visited in the winter by a small black and grey goose, the Brent Goose portrayed in the recent Supergoose series on TV. There are two races of Brent goose, the pale-bellied and the dark-bellied. The pale-bellied version breeds in Arctic Canada and Greenland, wintering only in Northern Ireland and Northumberland. Here, the best places to see the Brent goose are on Lough Foyle and Strangford Lough, with birds arriving from October onwards and feeding on the eelgrass beds of the loughs before moving onto agricultural land.

Large numbers of curlew, snipe and lapwing are seen in winter as birds breeding in Northern Ireland are joined by others moving down from the colder North. In the summer, waders depend on damp, open, rushy fields for nesting but in the winter they broaden the range of fields they use. Lapwing flocks feed on short-grazed grassland or winter cereals, single or small groups of snipe seek out any damp fields and curlews head to the coast adding crabs and lugworms to their usual diet of earthworms and leatherjackets.

Three members of the thrush family in Northern Ireland are resident, the song thrush, mistle thrush and blackbird. These birds are with us all year round but in the winter two extra thrushes join us, the fieldfare and the redwing. The fieldfare is slightly larger than the mistle thrush with a grey head and rump (area above the tail). The redwing, the smallest of these thrushes, has a cream stripe above the eye and a flush of red at the sides of the breast, hence its name. Both redwing and fieldfare are easily identified in the winter as they form large, noisy flocks, sometimes mixed in with starlings. Like our resident thrushes they feed on berries and earthworms, and are often seen feeding on tall hawthorn hedges or on short grass, whether it be in on farmland, parks or playing fields.

The Countryside Management Scheme and Environmentally Sensitive Areas scheme offer payments to farmers in return for farming in a way that benefits wildlife. The schemes have options to benefit both the winter visitors highlighted above and breeding birds that have declined in number. For further information contact Countryside Management Branch staff at your local DARD office.